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I’ve never been back here. Not since…” David Challen trails off as he approaches the family home where, in August 2010, his mother, Sally, killed his father, Richard, with 20 hammer blows to the head.

His voice drops to a whisper and – after a cursory glance – he turns his back on his home of 22 years.

“It looks as if the reality has been airbrushed over,” says David, now 31, flatly. “It doesn’t feel like ours any more. But there are still a lot of memories.”

David’s most recent memory of the house in Claygate, Surrey, is when he and his brother, James, 35, came to collect their possessions before it was sold. There were traces of blood on the ceiling and a missing curtain: their mother had lain...